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Archive for March, 2010

Depending on what time zone you live in, it may be April 1st, aka April Fools’ Day!

April Fools’ Day or All Fools’ Day is a holiday celebrated in various countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, enemies, and neighbors, or sending them on a fool’s errand, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible.

This year’s April Fools’ comes to us courtesy of Stack Overflow user Benjamin Dumke aka balpha, who created the Unicornify! service in late January — an act he kindly documented for us in My God, It’s Full of Unicorns! on meta. I’m sure we weren’t the first to think this would make an excellent April Fools’ joke, but it was so perfect we had to run with it.

We contacted Benjamin, who worked with us to make the one-day transition from Gravatar to Unicornify smooth — primarily by pre-rendering avatars for all the MD5 hashes for users in the data dump. Unicornify is hosted on Google App Engine, so we took over billing duties for the period of the switch.

It has come to the attention of the AWESOME committee that you have recently exceeded your awesome quotient. Normally this letter would simply serve as a warning and reminder as to your obligations in the LEAGUE OF AWESOME with regards to your display of AWESOME, however your recent display(s) of AWESOME have exceeded the limit beyond all normal care and due reason.

It is with heavy hearts that we are forced to take the following, regrettable, drastic action:

Mr. Balpha, on this day, March 31st, 2010, and henceforth, your membership in THE LEAGUE OF AWESOME is terminated, including all benefits, responsibilities, and services as described in your recently violated contract. You are hereby stricken from all records and are required to turn in your membership license or proof of its destruction. Also any and all other artifacts, including the LOA belt buckle, is to be returned immediately.

What, you never heard of the LEAGUE OF AWESOME? Well, maybe you’re just not AWESOME enough. How does one go about gaining membership in this exclusive club? per founding member Adam Davis:

I’m afraid applications for THE LEAGUE OF AWESOME are only accepted from current members of THE LEAGUE OF PRETTY COOL and, on rare occasion, members of THE LEAGUE OF I GUESS YOU’RE ALRIGHT.

So here’s to Benjamin, for not just coming up with an amazing April Fools’ joke for us, but in real “duct tape programmer” style, writing the code and practically handing it to us as a fait accompli.

The entire extended Stack Overflow team (including the Stack Exchange team) is meeting in New York in April to do some strategic planning. For example, we need to plan our Rock Band song lists, decide who gets to be on the drums and who is stuck with the USB cowbell, etc.

If you’re going to be in the city on Tuesday, April 6th, we’d like to invite you to join us for a party and a chance to meet the team.

If you want to come to the party, you mustregister. Please do not register if you’re not sure that you’re coming, as space is limited. Only people who are on the list will be admitted.

Update: Pictures from the Open House are now available! Thanks to everyone who attended!

Over the last month, API work has been our highest priority. Now we’re finally ready for private beta. We realize that getting an API right is challenging, and we would like “friends of the Trilogy” to begin giving us input on how our API should look and function.

The private API beta should last 6 to 8 weeks. We absolutely do not want to rush our API because once we release it, we will have to live with the consequences of those decisions for years. Perfection is obviously impossible, but I’ll settle for “avoided too many harebrained screwups … this time”.

Be deliberate about the quality of your API design or you will regret it later.

That’s the goal here. To be deliberate. And we can’t do it alone — our API exists to serve you, so we need your help to make it … not suck.

But fair warning — this is a private beta for a reason:

Version 1 is read only. Coming up with a solid API is hard enough without adding writing and authentication to the mix. So for the initial release, it’s a read-only API. We’ll take on the much more difficult problem of writing (and authentication) in v2.

We reserve the right to break the API every day. The private beta is our one shining moment to construct our API “the right way” with your feedback. So expect lots and lots of breakage. But it’s breakage to make it better.

If you build to our API, we will support you. We will be ultra responsive to your feedback during this private beta. And once the API is released, we vow to support version 1.0 of the API for a long time — and if there is a version 2.0, it will be supported in parallel with 1.0 for as long as we can. We’re honored you would write code against our API and we plan to return the favor by not breaking your code a year down the line.

If you have any interest at all in our API — you’re welcome to join the private beta! Just email us at team@stackoverflow.com and request access.

In related news, Diago has indicated he’d like to step down as a moderator. Thanks, Diago, for everything you’ve done so far — you had arguably the most difficult moderator position with the least support from us (which was totally our fault; a mistake I hope not to repeat) and you did an excellent job regardless. I completely understand and support the decision to take a break from moderating. You are welcome back as a moderator any time on my watch.

As always, I recommend that new moderators (or anyone interested in the topic) read through A Theory of Moderation — also, keep an eye on the following meta tags for discussion about what moderators should (or shouldn’t) be doing on the Trilogy:

While some moderation topics are inherently a private matter between users, we try to discuss as much of it in public as possible. We have a reasonable set of moderation guidelines, but how we moderate continues to evolve — and will hopefully improve as we bring in new community moderators with new perspectives and new ideas.

Joel and Jeff sit down with Anton Geraschenko to discuss the unique qualities of a community of expert mathematicians, how to capture a sphere in a knot, and the importance of off-site backups.

The Stack Overflow team will be in NYC from April 2nd to the 9th for a planning session. Expect exciting announcements at the end of that period, including some that will affect the podcast. Maybe there will be a Stack Overflow morning zoo crew!

There will also be a Stack Overflow open house in NYC sometime that week, so if you’re in the area, please keep an eye on the blog!

Anton founded Math Overflow, which runs on the Stack Overflow engine via Stack Exchange. Math Overflow might be the largest community of Math PhDs (and PhD candidates) on the internet. Anton, interestingly, is not a programmer so he was outside our initial audience.

Anton attributes much of the initial success of Math Overflow to math bloggers, and most notably Secret Blogging Seminar. He also solicited emails from influential members of the math community and invited them to all participate at launch.

Interestingly, Anton also cites the importance of a meta-discussion site to the overall success of a community. This is a conclusion we (well, I) had to be dragged to, kicking and screaming, before we finally created meta.stackoverflow.com. I suppose it is analogous to having a government of some kind before you can have a country.

The meaning of Joel’s oft-repeated phrase “no question is too easy” — which I would rephrase as “no question should be uninteresting” — has a whole different dimension on a site like Math Overflow which is intended for graduate level mathematics questions. Per Anton, you should probably ask “Does my community care about that?”

Math Overflow did some community specific customization by incorporating jsMath markup in their posts. This has always been the vision, to provide tools that tailor the ‘wiki’ aspect of the Stack Overflow to the needs of particular expert communities. They plan to switch to the newer MathJax soon. And LaTeX is of course a long term standard in this area.

I now appreciate the importance of off-site backups. It’s unlikely your datacenter will be hit by a meteor, but the odds of something going wrong with the air conditioning is much more likely. How likely? It happened to us! Remember kids, eat your Wheaties, and do your off-site backups! We’re also entertaining the idea of a read-only mode for the website for these rare conditions so we don’t have to tackle the very difficult problem of synchronizing data when you are running on a live backup.

Since we haven’t launched the Stack Exchange site on Siberian husky puppies (yet), Joel asks for some listener input on what type of treats his new dog Taco would like.